| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Barbara Bush's forever stamp and profiling her life of service at a ceremony at the White House. | |
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV. | ||
| Saturday is on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| And find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| Also passing away this year was longtime Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson, who passed away at the age of 79. | ||
| Samuelson appeared on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A in 2016 to talk about the state of the economy and the national debt. | ||
| Robert Samuelson, how would you describe what you do for a living? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I'm basically a reporter. | |
| I've been reporting about the economy since the late 1960s. | ||
| I write a column for the Washington Post Writers Group that appears in both the Washington Post and a number of other papers twice a week. | ||
| One of the columns appears mostly on the web. | ||
| The other column appears in the newspaper and on the web. | ||
| So what do you want people to learn from your columns? | ||
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unidentified
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What's the program new in every column? | |
| I don't always succeed. | ||
| And I'm trying to explain things to people so that even if they disagree with me, which many of them do, they will come away with a lot more information and a better analytical understanding of at least one point of view. | ||
| But I think I would be failing if people didn't learn something from most of my columns. | ||
| Do you have a political approach? | ||
| Do you come from a certain political ideology? | ||
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unidentified
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I wouldn't say I'm particularly ideological, although I'd say I'm slightly right of center. | |
| I would say I'm sort of mainstream, but on the right side of mainstream and not on the left side of mainstream. | ||
| But I'm not pushing a partisan agenda. | ||
| I'm pushing, to the extent I push an agenda, it's my agenda and not one of the party's agenda, or in most cases, even not any of the major senators or members of the House of Representatives, which may explain why over the years I don't detect that whatever I've written has influenced anybody to do anything, either good or bad. | ||
| In the last, say, year or so, is there a column that's gotten more reaction than any of the others? | ||
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unidentified
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You know, I'd have to go back and think about that. | |
| When I write about Social Security and Medicare, which is sort of what the government provides older Americans, including me, I usually get a pretty large reaction. | ||
| I've been writing about this now for over 20 or 30 years. | ||
| And my basic theme has been this is going to essentially squeeze out the spending on older people, which are now growing as a proportion of the total population. | ||
| It's basically going to squeeze out spending on other groups or result in large tax increases. | ||
| And that this is essentially unfair to younger Americans and that we need to revise these programs. | ||
| They are part of the social fabric. | ||
| They're very important. | ||
| But we ought to have higher eligibility ages introduced gradually and slowly. | ||
| We ought to have less generous benefits for the wealthier retirees, people like me who have saved or have been had the benefit of a retirement account, employer-provided retirement account. | ||
| And that we ought to modernize these programs in a way that we have not done. | ||
| And we have not done it essentially for political reasons because older Americans are a very large group and they're politically acute. | ||
| And also many of them feel not without reason that they've been promised these benefits and the government has no right to even reduce them by a penny. | ||
| So we ask you to come because of the column. | ||
| I know I've read your column for years and it always has good numbers in there so we can kind of figure out, try to figure out what's going on. | ||
| So I've got a ton of numbers and I've got a lot of your columns from the year and I want to get you to explain this. | ||
| First thing I want to put up on the screen is the United States population for the last eight years, basically talking since Barack Obama has been president. | ||
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unidentified
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There they are. | |
| It started out in 2009 with 307 million and we have gained up to the present enough that we can say we have at least 324 million people in the United States. | ||
| When you see that kind of a growth rate, does it mean anything? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, to me, it's an optimistic thing. | |
| It means that the United States is still growing as a body of people. | ||
| It's a very big country. | ||
| We have room for a lot of people. | ||
| If you look at some other advanced societies, they are not growing. | ||
| They have birth rates that are less than two for each adult woman. | ||
| And so if you have two adults and you have one offspring, pretty soon your population begins to go down and it gets older. | ||
| And you have a problem, it seems to me. | ||
| You have a welfare state that needs to support this older population, but you have a shrinking economic base because the number of new workers coming into the system is less than the number of older workers who are exiting the system. | ||
| And so you have a system that is basically fixed to fail. | ||
| That is not the case in the United States. | ||
| We have the same problems, but they're not nearly as acute. | ||
| If you look at, say, Italy or Germany or Japan, their birth rate is a little bit above one. | ||
| And in 40 or 50 years, they're essentially not going to have very many young people left in relationship to the older population. | ||
| This is a huge political problem, and I think it underlies some of the problems we see in Europe today in slow economic growth. | ||
| They have aging societies, and they simply cannot produce the kind of sustained economic growth that countries with growing populations have. | ||
| I don't want to leave the impression that growing population is the only thing that matters. | ||
| It obviously isn't. | ||
| You can have large numbers of poor people. | ||
| And over, historically, as countries have gotten richer, their birth rates have gone down. | ||
| So population by itself is not a good thing, but population in conjunction with reasonable economic growth is a sustainable political and economic model. | ||
| Here's the foreign-born U.S. population. | ||
| We only have it up to 2014, but it shows we have 42.2 million foreign-born up through 2014, and that's when the population was only 319 million. | ||
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unidentified
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But what about that ratio? | |
| Any other countries of the world have that kind of foreign-born population? | ||
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unidentified
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You know, I really don't know the comparison with other countries. | |
| I think that what this says for the United States is that I think having immigrants has been a great thing for the United States. | ||
| In fact, the country wouldn't exist if we didn't have immigrants. | ||
| On the other hand, absorbing the immigrants and assimilating them into American society that's already there is not an easy task. | ||
| It's never been an easy task. | ||
| And it seems to me that that is the fundamental reason why we need to curb illegal immigration and we need to reorient our immigration policies to having more skilled immigrants come in who will have an easier time assimilating and contributing to American growth and to being part of the American fabric. | ||
| But I think in general this is a healthy thing as long as we can to some extent control it. | ||
| We can't control it entirely, but we can control it more than we have. | ||
| And I think the fact that the United States has a tradition as part of the political culture and part of the, I think, and the economic culture of absorbing immigrants, that that bodes well in the long run. | ||
| But people forget or they don't register enough on both sides of this argument. | ||
| One is that we have assimilated millions and millions of immigrants in the past, so we should be reasonably optimistic about our capability of doing it now. | ||
| But on the other side, that when we've had waves of immigrants, there's always been social tensions, there have always been economic tensions. | ||
| And so just the notion you ought to have unlimited immigration seems to me also to be a formula for failure and is bound to create the kind of reaction to the inflow of immigrants that we see today, which is in its worst forms quite ugly, and in its mildest forms is understandable. | ||
| How far do you go back in your own family where your family were immigrants? | ||
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unidentified
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I believe, you know, this is something I want to research more and I sort of haven't researched enough, but in both cases, both my mother's side and my father's side, their forefathers came in the 19th century. | |
| Now, my wife's, on the other hand, my wife's parents immigrated from what is now, I think, Latvia to the United States. | ||
| So my wife is a first-generation immigrant. | ||
| How about your family? | ||
| Where do they come from? | ||
| Germany and Russia, what is now Germany and Russia. | ||
| And you grew up where in the United States and where did you go to school? | ||
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unidentified
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I grew up outside New York City in Westchester County, White Plains, New York. | |
| I went to public school through seventh grade and then went to private school in Massachusetts and went to Harvard as an undergraduate. | ||
| And I've asked you this before, we might as well get it on the record. | ||
| You're not Paul Samuelson's son or any relation to Paul Samuelson. | ||
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unidentified
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Paul Samuelson was one of the most eminent economists in the post-war era, died a few years ago. | |
| I am not related to him, although he does have a son, I am told, Robert J. Samuelson. | ||
| And he had a good sense of humor as well as being a brilliant economist. | ||
| When I approached, Newsweek hired me in the early 1980s to write a column for Newsweek. | ||
| And Paul Samuelson had previously written that column. | ||
| And he sent me a very nice little note saying, I think it was one line, someone named Samuelson can't be all bad. | ||
| More numbers. | ||
| And I warn our audience, there's a lot of numbers in this show. | ||
| This is, and we're talking about the time that Barack Obama has been president mostly from 2009 to 2016. | ||
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unidentified
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These are gas prices. | |
| What's happened to the average gas price per gallon? | ||
| And you go back to 2009, you can see it on the screen. | ||
| It was $2.41. | ||
| It went up in 2012 to as high as $3.68. | ||
| And it's now back down to an average, although from a day-to-day basis, this may be off $0.05 or $0.6. | ||
| $2.06 nationwide. | ||
| What does that mean to an economy? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think what this little table shows you, one, is that we don't control oil or gasoline prices in any sort of obvious way, or you wouldn't have these kind of huge fluctuations. | |
| You'd have gasoline selling at $1 or $150 or $2 forever. | ||
| Secondly, what you see in the trend is that in 2009, you have to remember we were in the midst of the Great Recession, which was a consequence of the financial crisis. | ||
| And so people were driving less, companies were producing less. | ||
| This was a worldwide phenomenon. | ||
| And since gasoline and oil are worldwide commodities, the lack of demand against a sort of an existing supply resulted in depressed prices. | ||
| As we recovered from the Great Recession, prices went back up and they got back over $100 a barrel for crude oil. | ||
| Then you had two things happening. | ||
| You had sort of the introduction or the expansion of oil shale production in the United States in both the Midwest and in Texas with fracking, which increased our capacity dramatically. | ||
| So the supply was increased. | ||
| And then you had sort of the breakdown of OPEC and the production of huge production of gasoline and oil by Saudi Arabia, which so the supply basically overwhelmed demand and prices went down again. | ||
| Before we go any further, what's your reaction without getting into the individuals so much of this election season? | ||
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unidentified
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What are your observations? | |
| Well, I'm not sure I'll share my observations, but we'll share my feelings. | ||
| I feel I'm a pretty patriotic person. | ||
| I think America is a great country. | ||
| I'm glad that I'm American, and I think it's one of the greatest things that can befall anybody to be an American citizen. | ||
| And I've been pretty much proud of the United States most of my life when I'm 70. | ||
| I'm not proud of the United States for this election. | ||
| I feel this at a very kind of gut level. | ||
| I think Donald Trump is a man that stirs animosities, and that's the wrong kind of campaign to run. | ||
| But I'm not crazy about the fact that the Democratic Party produced a candidate who is widely mistrusted, and she must have something to do with it, the origins of that mistrust. | ||
| But I'm particularly bothered by the Trump candidacy. | ||
| We people in the sort of the ideas business, pundits, scholars, whatever, like to think that we could resolve most of our problems if we simply have open, honest debates about them. | ||
| Well, that's a little bit naive. | ||
| I discovered that pretty early when I started writing a column. | ||
| But it's not so naive to think that ideas would play some role in major elections. | ||
| And yet in this campaign, a lot of it has just boiled down to sort of personal attacks and counterattacks. | ||
| And it's pretty discouraging, frankly. | ||
| For the first time, we said as moral citizens, we have to do what is right for our country. | ||
| Our country is not always right. | ||
| Nobody wants to be a failure, but I had failed in trying to protect the president. | ||
| And I knew that humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. | ||
| The America I know is grounded in the determination found in patriots and pioneers, in small businesses with big ideas. | ||
| Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. | ||
| The judiciary is an institution which is not a political institution. | ||
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unidentified
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The whole point of it is not to be one. | |
| What can we in the older generation do to make a better world for this country? | ||
| Before we leave the stage, what can we accomplish? | ||
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unidentified
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We do have a problem in baseball, and using steroids is not respecting the game. | |
| We were so curious, so excited about being at the moon that we are like three school kids looking into a candy store window watching those ancient old creators go by. | ||
| Our current state of slow motion national decline is a choice. | ||
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unidentified
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I see the community that we can be and the strength that we do have, it makes me all the more passionate about joining that community and raising whatever I can do to help raise the voice to represent the people. | |
| Every one of us, not just the young people, but all of us have to remember that each day we actually do make a difference. | ||
| It's time for America's leaders to stop pointing the finger of blame and to begin sharing the credit for success. | ||
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unidentified
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What I have discovered is that, from activism and having a position on something to trying to get something | |
| done on an area. | ||
| You cannot hold on to strict positions because you find that the perfect is enemy of the good. | ||
| Post encouraged me to be better, to do more, to find out things I hadn't known. | ||
| It was and is my home. | ||
| 2025 also saw the death of sports writer and author John Feinstein, who died at the age of 69 from a heart attack. | ||
| Feinstein joined C-SPAN's QA in 2011 to discuss the role of the federal government in sports and the overlap of sports and politics. |